Career Day



Career Day

Originally uploaded by brocktice


I discovered that my scanner will automatically crop out separate photos from the scan bed and load them all into iPhoto. I’ve been scanning all of my old photos so that they can’t be taken away from me by another natural disaster.

I won’t be posting them all to Flickr, and I won’t be highlighting them all on my blog, but this one deserves attention. I’ll paste my photo caption from Flickr:

In this eerily accurate photo, my sister and I pose before going off to career day. My sister dressed as a business woman (and ended up going to business school). I dressed up as a scientist, absent-minded and with a hand full of calculus. If I’d known how dangerous the stuff on that piece of paper was, I would have dropped it. Here I stand, a scientist all these years later.

ADDENDUM: Please don’t ask me to do triple integrals.

Cisco VPN Client Error 51 After Leopard 10.5.3 Upgrade

JHU uses Cisco VPN for outside connections to the university network. Unfortunately, this requires using Cisco’s VPN client, which is not really available for free download on the internet at large. Normally when I have a problem, I just re-install it, but the current version provided by Hopkins refuses to install on 10.5.3, citing a wrong O.S. version number. “Must be 10.4 or greater.” So 10.5 !>= 10.4? Anyway, what’s the problem I was trying to fix?

After upgrading my workstation from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3, the VPN client refused to load with a message about “Client error 51”, saying it couldn’t find the VPN service. This may be related to my use of an external USB wifi adapter, but it was never a problem in 10.5.2. Regardless, I found that restarting the VPN service fixed the problem. As an administrative user, I had to run this:


sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Now everything works fine.

Spore Creature Creator

I finally tried the Spore Creature Creator yesterday, and took a little movie. I then discovered the the software includes a mechanism to auto-upload videos to YouTube. Smart on their part. My first attempt is below.